U.S. President Donald Trump announced his intent on Monday to nominate retired U.S. Army Col. Douglas Macgregor as U.S. ambassador to Germany to succeed Richard Grenell, despite the veteran’s views of Jews and the Iranian threat.
In a 2012 interview with The Daily Bell, Macgregor blamed neoconservatives, or “neocons,” for “making decisions in Washington that in their minds are beneficial to a foreign power and are not necessarily good for the American people or the United States.”
Some of the first neocons, including Irving Kristol, were Jewish.
“It is a mistake to insist, as I increasingly hear from people, that ‘all Jews are somehow or another unconditional supporters of whatever the Israeli state wants to do, regardless of what is in the American interest,” said Macgregor. “That’s simply not true. What you have are numbers of people who call themselves neocons. They operate in a variety of settings in the government and in the media, and they support or advocate, for all intents and purposes, unconditional support for whatever the Israeli government wants to do. They are no means the majority and they are by no means representative of what I would call Americans who happen to be Jewish.”
In an appearance on Tucker Carlson’s prime-time show on Fox News, Macgregor dismissed the Iranian threat, saying “there’s no evidence that Iran wants to attack us.”
Macgregor also blamed “neocon” advisers for Trump eliminating Iranian Gen. Qassem Soleimani earlier this year.
Grenell, on the other hand, was lauded during his ambassador tenure to be a friend of the Jewish community and was outspoken about anti-Semitism and the Iranian threat, including both successfully pushing for Germany to fully designate Hezbollah, an Iranian proxy, as a terrorist group and to sanction Iranian airline Mahan Air.
